The present invention relates generally to software-defined networking, and more specifically, to a software-defined networking single-source enterprise workload manager.
An enterprise network is typically built and managed by an organization to interconnect a number of computing resources at various locations. In traditional enterprise network architectures, there is no centralized network control. Routing tables located locally in network devices, such as switches, bridges, gateways, routers, or firewalls, are individually configured to direct network traffic to neighboring nodes of the network. The network devices may make control decisions and forward network traffic accordingly.
In software-defined networking (SDN), network traffic routing decisions are made by a controller that creates tables to define flow paths through the network. The controller decouples control decisions about where traffic is sent from network devices that forward traffic to a selected destination. Tables used to manage flows in SDN are typically manually created and managed by a person acting as a network administrator. An enterprise network may include a large number of flows between many computing resources. As the number of flows increases, the burden of setting up and effectively managing the flows can become overwhelming for the network administrator, making SDN challenging to implement and maintain at an enterprise level.